Software RAID 5 or something else?
Gordon Messmer
yinyang at eburg.com
Sat Jan 24 00:02:19 UTC 2009
aragonx at dcsnow.com wrote:
>
> My original idea was to put them in a RAID 5 configuration. This sounded
> good until I started researching RAID controller cards. It looks like it
> will cost me $520 to get a good PCI-E card (3Ware 8 port). I don't think
> I want to spend that much if I don't have to.
>
> My goals are two fold.
>
> 1) I want to get some redundancy in case of a drive failure.
>
> 2) I want to increase my performance.
If you want to increase performance relative to a single drive, RAID 5
is the wrong choice. Many (most, in my experience) workloads will run
slower on RAID 5. I recommend running RAID 10 if you think the storage
needs to be faster. Either get sixth drive for 2.25TB of storage, or
set up a 1.5TB array with a hot spare.
Software RAID is fine if you don't want to pay for a controller, but get
yourself a UPS.
> I have benchmarked my read and
> write performance to and from this server. Using Samba, I seem to be able
> to get about 50Mb/sec reads and 40Mb/sec writes. I am on a gig network
> and would like to be able to max out the cards (90Mb/sec is what I get at
> work).
More than likely, you need to enable jumbo frames on all of your systems.
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